All quiet about the folly of ringfencing

Pledges by the Government to ringfence spending on the NHS, education and overseas aid look more contentious than ever.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies, the closest we have to an objective observer of the public finances, has crunched the numbers, as it does after every Budget, and its findings are worrying. The headline is that government spending, adjusted for inflation, must fall by 3.1 per cent in each of the four financial years from 2011-12 to 2014-15 — a total of £46 billion a year by March 2015 — to reduce the budget deficit along the lines laid out by Alistair Darling.

That would be a cumulative cut of 11.9 per cent and painful enough. But if those three other areas are ringfenced for the